Appelbaum: ‘Scary’ NSA will spy on you – every which way they can

Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum revealed what he calls “wrist-slitting depressing” details about the National Security Agency’s spy programs at a computer conference in Germany on Monday where he presented previously unpublished NSA files.

Appelbaum is among the small group of experts, activists and
journalists who have seen classified United States intelligence
documents
taken earlier this year by former contractor Edward Snowden, and previously
he represented transparency group WikiLeaks at an American hacker
conference in 2010. Those conditions alone should suffice in
proving to most anybody that Appelbaum has been around more than
his fair share of sensitive information, and during his
presentation at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress
in Hamburg on Monday he spilled his guts about some of the
shadiest spy tactics seen yet through leaked documents.

Presenting in-tandem with the publishing of an article in
Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, Appelbaum explained to the
audience of his hour-long “To Protect and Infect” address early
Monday that the NSA has secretly sabotaged US businesses by
covertly — and perhaps sometimes with the cooperation of the tech
industry — coming up with ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the
products sold by major American companies, including Dell and
Apple, among others.

That was only the main theme of many covered throughout the
presentation, during which Appelbaum repeatedly revealed
previously unpublished top-secret NSA documents detailing the
tactics and techniques used by the NSA to intercept the
communications of seemingly anyone on Earth.

“Basically the NSA, they want to be able to spy on you. And
if they have ten different options for spying on you that you
know about, they have 13 ways of doing it and they do all 13. So
that’s a pretty scary thing,” he said.

While nearly seven months’ worth of stories made possible by
leaked files pilfered by Snowden have helped explain the extent
of the spy agency’s surveillance operations, Appelbaum used his
allotted time to help shine light on exactly how the NSA
compromises computers and cell phones to infect the devices of
not just targeted users, but the entire infrastructure that those
systems run on.

“Basically their goal is to have total surveillance of
everything that they are interested in,” he said. “There
really is no boundary to what they want to do. There is only
sometimes a boundary of what they are funded to be able to do,
and the amount of things they are able to do at scale they seem
to just do those things without thinking too much without
it.”

“They would be able to break into this phone, almost
certainly, and turn on the microphone,” Appelbaum said at
one point as he re-inserted the battery into his mobile device.
“All without a court, and that to me is really scary.”
Indeed, classified files shown later during his presentation
revealed a device that for $175,800 allows the NSA or another
license client to construct a fake cell tower than can allow
officials to eavesdrop on texts and talks alike.

“They replace the infrastructure they connect to. It’s like
replacing the road that we would walk on and adding tons of spy
gear,” he said. “And they do that too!”

To do as much, Appelbaum added, the intelligence agency has
deployed an intricate system of tools and tactics which could
eavesdrop not just by hacking into computers with viruses, but by
outfitting machines with miniature, remote-controlled bugs and in
some instances by relying on beams of radio waves to help
identify sensitive information sent across systems. Routinely, he
explained, the NSA takes advantage of flaws in computer code.
Otherwise, however, documents suggest they’ve opened shipping
containers and installed their own, stealthy spy chips into the
computers of targets.

Stories based on leaked Snowden files have previously linked the
US agency and its British counterpart — the GCHQ — with an array
of nefarious activity, including operations that sucked up
signals intelligence, or SIGINT, from foreign citizens and
leaders alike, including Germany Chancellor Angela
Merkel. By using a program codenamed TURMOIL and another
TURBINE, Appelbaum said, the NSA and GCHQ can inspect the packets
being sent anywhere across the web and then insert its own code
when it wants to not just eavesdrop, but infiltrate,
respectively.

The NSA says the routine collection of data isn’t illegal,
Appelbaum said, because the government relies on perverse
language to justify scooping the intelligence — and not
necessarily scouring it.

“It’s only surveillance if after they collect it and record
it to a database and analyze it with machines, only if I think an
NSA agent basically looks at it personally and then clicks ‘I
have looked at this do they call it surveillance,” Appelbaum
said. “Fundamentally, I really object to that.”

In contrast, he added, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,
or CFAA, has been used a handful of times just in 2013 alone to
put away suspected hackers accused of modifying
computer programs for arguably harmless crimes.

“It’s so draconian for regular people, and the NSA gets to do
something like intercepting 7 billion people all day long with no
problems, and the rest of us are not even allowed to experiment
for improving the security of own our lives without being put in
prison or under threat of serious indictment,” he said.

“This is what [Thomas] Jefferson talked about when he talked
about tyranny,” he said. “This is turnkey tyranny and it
is here.”

Aside from the erosion of privacy, though, Appelbaum added that
the top-secret operations of the NSA raise a number of questions
about exploits that could be used by competing foreign powers.
Many of the NSA’s tactics involve taking advantage of little
known or hidden vulnerabilities in hardware and software, then
exploiting them for gain.

If the manufacturers of those products are aware of the
vulnerability, Appelbaum suggested, then they are being complicit
in the NSA’s crimes. And if they are ignorant, then the existence
of those vulnerabilities means any competing nation-station could
likely exploit them as well.

“If the Chinese, if the Russians if people here wish to build
this system, there is nothing to stop them,” he said.
“The NSA has in a literal sense retarded the process by which
we would secure the internet because it establishes a hegemony of
power — Their power in secret to do these things.”

“This strategy is undermining the internet in a direct
attempt to keep it insecure,” one of Appelbaum’s slides
read.

The revelations made possible during the last half-year thanks to
Snowden’s supply of documents and the programmers who have worked
to patch exploits known to the NSA have driven many
privacy-focused individuals around the globe to adopt new
practices. Even as that wave of countersurveillance grows,
however, Appelbaum cautioned that quite literally no one can be
spared from the US government’s dragnet snooping.

“You can’t hide from these things, and thinking that they
won’t find you is a fallacy,” said Appelbaum, a core member
of the anonymity routing program Tor.

And while calls for congressional reform
in Washington have only intensified in the weeks, then months
since the first Snowden leak in early June, Appelbaum — a US
citizen has not returned to the US since before the Summer of
Snowden — said lawmakers lack both the knowhow and ability to act
on these issues.

“Members of the US Congress they have no clue about these
things — literally in the case of the technology,” he said.
“You can’t even get a meeting with them. I tried. Doesn’t
matter. Even if you know the secret interpretation of Section 215
of the PATRIOT Act act and you go to Washington, DC and you meet
with their aides they still won’t talk to you about it. Part of
that is that they don’t have a clue. And another part of it is
they can’t talk about it because they don’t have a political
solution. Absence a political solution it’s very difficult to get
someone to admit that there is a problem. Well, there is a
problem.”

If anyone outside of the NSA is aware of what’s going on,
Appelbaum said, then it’s like the tech industry players whose
devices contain exploits known to governments like the US.

“Fuck those guys,” Appelbaum said, “for
collaborating when they do. And fuck them for leaving us
vulnerable when they do.”

A server made by Texas-based Dell Computers, for instance — the
Dell PowerEdge 2950 — contains a flaw that can let the NSA or any
other entity hack the machinery and then run amok with its
motherboard.

And even the Apple iPhone — one of the most popular handheld
devices in the world — can be exploited by the NSA, according to
one of the classified documents, to let officials surreptitiously
take pictures with the mobile’s camera or stealthy turn on its
microphone, access text messages or listen to voicemail.

According to Appelbaum, it’s likely that it’s not just a
coincidence that the NSA can infiltrate iPhones with ease. In one
document he saw, he said the NSA “literally claim that any
time they target an iOS device, that it will succeed for
implantation.”

“Either they have a huge collection of exploits that work
against Apple products — meaning they are hoarding information
about critical systems American companies product and sabotaging
them — or Apple sabotages it themselves,” he said.

Other products made by the likes of Western Digital, Seagate,
Maxtor and Samsung all contain vulnerabilities as well, according
to those documents, and the secret software used by the NSA and
others to exploit them are available for free to
properly-credentialed agencies.

“Everything that the United States government accused the
Chinese of doing — which they are also doing, I believe—we are
learning that the US government has been doing to American
companies,” Appelbaum said. “That to me is really
concerning, and we’ve had no public debate about these issues.
And in many cases, all the technical details are obfuscated
away.”

Until now, that is. During Monday’s presentation, Appelbaum named
no fewer than a half-dozen US companies linked to NSA operations
and is asking them to explain why they didn’t patch up their
vulnerabilities.

Some of the NSA’s tactics, however, might warrant more than just
a minor operation. Appelbaum far from caught his crowd off guard
when he showed slides demonstrating how the NSA can hack Wi-Fi
signals from eight miles away and when he proved they insert
ant-sized computer chips into USB cables to conduct surveillance.

“Well what if I told you that the NSA had a specialized
technology for beaming energy into you and to the computer
systems around you?” Appelbaum asked before wrapping up his
presentation. “Would you believe that that is true, or would
that be paranoid speculation of a crazy person?”

Slides shared by Appelbaum suggest that the NSA is indeed in the
business of transmitting radio frequency waves to targets, which,
in effect, can help decode the images displayed on computer
monitors or typed on keyboards using technology not unlike what
Russian inventor Leon Theremin used to spy for the KGB. This
time, though, the NSA may be sending waves with the intensity of
1 kW at a target from only a few feet away.

“I bet the people who were around Hugo Chavez are going to
wonder what caused his cancer,” Appelbaum said WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange told him after hearing about the latest
NSA leaks.